Just 100 Days In and It's Clear This Government Doesn't Care

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11/08/2015 17:21 BST
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Updated
11/08/2016 10:59 BST

To mark 100 days of the first Conservative government in nearly 20 years, HuffPost UK is running 100 Days of Dave, a special series of blog posts from grassroots campaigners to government ministers, single parents to first-year students, reflecting on what's worked and what hasn't, whilst looking for solutions to the problems we still face.

Is it 100 days already? A hell of a lot has happened and trying to condense what I have seen may be a Herculean task. But I love a challenge...

When you hear safe Labour MPs saying "the longest suicide note in history," implying that any turn to the Left would be suicidal, remember that the phrase was coined by Gerard Kaufman in reference to Labour's 1983 manifesto. Kaufman - one of only 48 Labour MPs to vote against the Welfare Bill - has gone from the right of the Labour Party to the left - not because he's changed his politics, but because the rest of the party has.

Labour has become that which it was set up to oppose. And the infighting that followed the General Election and the leadership contests has been farcical. Corbyn is Labour's best hope of salvaging some credibility with the Scottish electorate and enabling Labour to work with the SNP in the Commons against the cruel ideology of this government.

The SNP's youngest MP, Mhairi Black, in just an eight-minute maiden address, spoke with sense, conviction, and truth, delivered hope and empathy - and behaved more like the opposition than Labour.

More than 11million people have watched her speech online and we could be seeing a First Minister in the making. However, most of the mainstream media have the SNP tagged as the tartan faction of Isis, while the true architects of the break-up of the union are sitting on the government benches, in cahoots with the majority of Her Majesty's Opposition.

As a former Labour voter it gives me no pleasure to witness the depths the party has descended to. Have they lost all sense of morality? It looked like Labour has abstained from Westminster and not just on welfare - gutless, mindless, hopeless.

The Labour Party cannot have it both ways. If they support the Conservative Budget, they are not the opposition, just a coalition partner with no influence and no voice.

You are not elected as a member of parliament to abstain. Indeed, the shadow Scottish secretary was on TV news saying he opposed the Welfare Bill - and then abstained. How can you know the devil's mind? However, BBC Reporting Scotland were not going to question this.

The man is clearly out of his depth; he only has the shadow cabinet position because he begged Tory voters in his constituency to vote tactically to stop the nationalist tidal wave. He is adrift on an island like Robinson Crusoe, and the natives are getting restless.

The opinion polls show SNP support has increased since the General Election so there will be plenty more Labour heads on poles come the Holyrood vote next year. And the council elections in 2017 should hopefully also bring to an end to more than 80 years of Labour misrule in my home city of Glasgow.

So in the first 100 days millions of families will lose more than £1,000 a year and social tenants with two adults on minimum wage face double or triple rent increases in some areas. The new minimum wage is not enough - it will make little difference in the face of these kinds of changes.

That is just the first wave of Cameron's new agenda, and it chills me to the marrow.

The rabid right of the Conservative government, have now declared war on the Trade Union movement.

By attacking ordinary working people the government have laid the seeds of discontent and civil conflict in this country.

If this is what happens after just three months, the end of this government term may make Thatcherism seem like a kiddies' tea party - except it won't be much of of a party, as more people will come to rely on food banks, more will be made homeless or die due to austerity, which will increase, more vulnerable and disabled people will be forced to look for work that doesn't exist and the NHS will be further pillaged and stripped of value.

Scottish Labour leadership contender Kezia Dugdale has slammed potential Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, so why were you happy to work alongside the Tories during the referendum campaign, but cannot contemplate working with someone from your own party who has been chosen by the Labour membership to stand as leader?

David Mundell is irrelevant in Scotland, or would be were we given actual, effective devolvement. He's also a Conservative, so naturally he seeks to undermine the SNP at every opportunity. The decisions on spending made by the Scottish government, not to mention many proposals in the Smith Report, have been completely ignored and trodden all over.

The Smith Commission was always a weak compromise. Now, because of Westminster's arrogance, it is an insult to the people of Scotland, No voters included. It's what Westminster does.

The SNP is rejecting the policing, health service and educational cuts that will impact on everyone in the UK, and SNP MPs were justified in occupying the official front benches of the opposition in parliament.

Any time I have watched debates on the Parliament Channel I have seen a healthy SNP turnout - they are doing their job. In fact a friend told me that his new SNP representative had spoken and contributed more times already in the debating chamber in five weeks than the previous Labour MP had in five years. There are only 48 MPs fit to use the Labour benches, as the rest may as well sit with their chums on the government side. As after all, they have a lot in common.

Cameron has no right to stop any future independence referendum as a 10% margin is by no way decisive. When the SNP include a referendum on independence in any future Holyrood manifesto, the people can decide if they want one.

One hundred days in and clearly this ideologically right wing government does not care, we are living in one of the richest countries in the world in the 21st Century, and our children are relying on charities for food.

It wants to ensure it can blame those in poverty for their predicament. We are heading back to the Victorian idea of the undeserving poor. No good can come from a government and society that relinquishes its responsibility to underprivileged children to charities.

All this comes at the same time as welfare benefits are reduced, creating even greater inequalities between the haves and have-nots and making the poor an easy scapegoat, helped by the newspapers and shows like Benefits Street and Life On The Dole. And public services, already at breaking point, will be subject to further cuts.

And as I write this the first RBS shares are being flogged off by Gideon at a loss, rich boys looking after their own, what's the bet the share value will rocket once it is no longer owned by the taxpayer?